by Nikki Wild
“Ms. Lawson!” a man—someone I even recognized from television—called after me. “How could you do this to Julian Bastille?”
I couldn’t take it anymore. All of these wild accusations had driven me over the edge—and despite promising myself that I wouldn’t say anything to these monsters, I couldn’t spend another moment helplessly hounded by them, either. I wouldn’t just cower when the world called me such awful things—I was going to fight back.
I was going to take control.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I would never hurt Julian,” I said, whipping around on the reporter and his accompanying cameraman. They both flinched backward, eyes wide, apparently not anticipating my wrath. “I may be a lot of things, but I’m not in this for the damn money. Our life—Julian’s and mine—is exactly that. Ours. And that means it’s none of your business.” I could have stopped right there, but taking the reins like this had opened up the floodgates on my anger. Seething, I added, “Now fuck off!”
As though they’d smelled blood in the water, a flurry of additional questions came roaring in, and more and more of the reporters from outside began filing in, convinced I was not willing to answer their questions.
“Ms. Lawson! Are you faking your pregnancy?” a new reporter demanded to know. “Is the child even Julian’s? Has there been a paternity test? Whose baby is it?”
I wanted to kick myself for giving them even a bit of an answer. The longer I stood there, fixed to the floor of the lobby, the louder and more demanding they became for answers, cameras once again flashing in my face.
I wasn’t sure how long I stood there, frozen, until hotel security finally intervened, pushing back the crowd and swiftly guiding me toward the elevator. They asked what room I was staying in, and I readily told them. Whatever it took to get me out of this mess, that was what I was willing to do. They could have asked me for my social security number in exchange for safe haven, and in that moment, I might very well have given it to them.
Everything after that passed by as if I was in a dream, time moving in ways I couldn’t even comprehend, my brain reeling from the trauma of what had just occurred—the accusations that had been leveled at me from people who didn’t even know me. Why the hell were they accusing me of conning Julian?
Before I knew it I was in a suite. The security officers were standing at the threshold, asking that I stay in my room until the reporters could be removed from the premises. I nodded numbly and shut the door behind me, slumping against it. Just like that, I was alone again, my face wet from the fountain of tears I had cried in the elevator, still shaking as I tried to hold back the tide of sobs threatening to wrack my ribs. How had all of this gone so wrong?
I never should have gone along with this, I thought, shuffling toward the couch in the common area. My knees gave out just as I reached it and I sat, hard, letting the cushions all but swallow me whole. We should have just told the truth right from the beginning. Let the world know we made a silly drunken mistake, and see what happened from there. This could have been done quietly, instead of trying to have our cake and eat it too. We should have—
I took out my phone again and tried to call Julian, but the moment I hit the “call” button, a prerecorded message played instead.
“We’re sorry, your device has been disconnected from the network. For more information, please contact…”
I threw the cell onto the bed and reached for the hotel phone on the table. Before I could dial a single number, a large television on the wall caught my attention. Julian had just stepped into view. Shaking, I grabbed for the remote and turned up the volume.
Julian
At the sound of the doorknob rattling I leapt to my feet, ready to lay into Tessa the moment I saw her. But instead of Tessa, I found a mousy-looking woman standing there with a bag clutched firmly in her hand. I wasn’t sure what was going on until she stepped into the room, set the bag down on the table, and opened it to reveal a plethora of makeup.
“You’re here to get me ready for the cameras,” I said, heaving a sigh as I sat back down in the chair I’d been occupying since Tessa had locked me in that room.
“Yes, sir,” the girl stammered, flashing me a faint smile before she started getting out the things she’d need to make sure my face didn’t shine. It’s almost unbelievable how much foundation gets put onto people just so they look somewhat normal on your telly. The makeup helped to keep the lights from bleaching out the overly pale and from cutting the glare that often reflected off the skin. Even during my concerts, I’d been practically covered in the stuff as they filmed my sets.
“Let’s get on with it, then,” I said, closing my eyes as I heard the sound of the door opening again. I frowned, lifting my lids again just in time to see Tessa storm into the room, a stack of papers in her hands. She didn’t look happy in the slightest.
“Get out,” she snapped at the girl, whose brush hovered not even an inch from my face. She froze, and Tessa bellowed, “Now!”
I’d never seen someone disappear so quickly, taking her bag and all its contents with her as she darted back out into the hallway. I shook my head in disdain as I opened my mouth to speak, only to be cut off before I had the chance to.
“You really are an idiot,” Tessa hissed, slamming the door after the girl and walking up to the edge of the desk I’d been sitting at for the past hour. “This was so easy to avoid, but you couldn’t resist getting your dick wet, could you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, fists clenching as she slammed the stack of papers down onto the table. She looked so odd—obviously she was angry, but there was something cold behind her eyes too, something almost calculating, precise. But then again, that had always been Tessa, hadn’t it?
“You just had to sleep with the first girl in Vegas that opened her legs,” she growled, “and now look where we are, about to give a press conference about how you fell for one of the oldest fucking tricks in the book.”
“Tessa, what the hell are you even talking about?” I asked, “What trick? What do you know that I don’t?”
“That’s a long list, Julian, and not one that I’m willing to detail in full,” Tessa answered, spanning her fingers across the stack of papers in front of me. “Regardless, I can at least tell you that your blushing bride has been playing you from the very beginning.”
I swallowed. “You’re full of shit,” I said, trying not to turn my gaze toward the papers she’d laid there in front of me. But was it because I didn’t believe her, or that I didn’t want to? I could already feel my heart racing, that slow chill creeping into my chest from the bottom of my stomach.
“Liz wouldn’t do that,” I murmured. “That isn’t the kind of person she is.”
“And how would you know that, Julian?” Tessa asked, eyebrows peaked as she stood straight again and put her hands on her hips. “You’ve spent a few days with her and you trust her more than you trust me—the woman who’s been beside you every step of your career? Guiding you to where you are now? Picking you up off of the floor after every drunken stupor?”
As much as I wanted to refute her, Tessa had a point—just how well did I know Liz? I mean, aside from a drunken night in Vegas together—one that neither of us remembered—we’d been together for all of a week; and while it had been the best week of my life, did that really mean that I knew the first thing about her? Liz could have been anyone in the world. There was no way I’d even scratched the surface of who she was in such a short amount of time, no matter what I felt to the contrary.
I glanced down at the papers despite my better judgment, squinting at the small black type. I’d been expecting photos, but this appeared to be a series of e-mails Tessa had printed out.
“What’s this?” I asked, resisting as best I could the urge to actually read one. The truth was I wanted so badly for Tessa to be wrong—to be so completely and totally off-base about this entire thing… but unless I knew all the facts, then I was ju
st as much of a chump as she’d said I was.
“E-mails… and a few text messages,” she said. “All of them between Elizabeth and her friend Jennifer. All of them about you.”
“Why is that so shocking?” I snorted and looked away from the stack, trying to affect an air of confidence I didn’t really feel. “Of course she talks to Jen about me. They are friends. I’m not going to sit here reading her private email!”
Tessa looked at me like I was a particularly slow child. “These e-mails aren’t recent, Julian.” She tapped her finger against a line on the top sheet, indicating a date of some months before I’d even been to Vegas. That was right around the time I’d made the announcement about the show. “They’ve been planning this for months.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“You want me to read you the damn things?” Tessa shouted, lifting the emails back up. “You’ve been drinking a long time Julian. Do you ever black out and forget a whole damn night?”
“I must have hit things a bit hard…”
“Rohypnol, Julian. It’s all right here,” Tessa said, slapping at the paper. “The date rape drug! They drugged you!”
My heart sank. Over the past hour, I’d been doing my best to dismiss the intrusive thoughts I’d had about Liz’s fidelity, about whether or not she was who she’d said she was. I’d been calling myself a paranoid fool for even entertaining the notion she’d betray me—sure, we’d had a fight, but not one big enough for her to throw everything we had away.
What did we have, though, really? An accidental marriage, an inconvenient pregnancy, and a few good lays? No, it had to be more than that. We’d shared things with each other. Hadn’t we? Or at least, I had. The koi fish tattooed along my ribs throbbed suddenly and I touched it through my shirt, wincing.
“These can’t be real,” I said, giving in to my morbid curiosity and beginning to read through the papers. “You’re lying…”
More softly than I’d expected, Tessa said, “It’s all real, Julian. The marriage, the baby—it was all just an elaborate scheme, meticulously planned and elegantly executed. You fell right into their trap.”
“None of this makes any sense,” I said, running a hand through my hair as I grabbed the papers from Tessa. I read over one e-mail after another, each one detailing the various stages of an intricate plan, from discovery of which hotel I was staying at, to getting me drunk at the bar, right down to making sure I wasn’t wearing any protection when we had sex.
Sweat clung to my temples. I covered my mouth with the tips of my fingers. My stomach clenched and threatened to lurch. This couldn’t be true.
“Doesn’t it?” Tessa asked incredulously. “She just wanted to take you for a damn child support payment, Julian—and the alimony that would have gone alone with the divorce! This was her plan all along!”
“But she didn’t remember what happened, either,” I said, my voice growing weaker as my gaze returned to the pages in front of me, each of them more damning than the last.
Tessa threw up her hands. Now there was an expression on her face I understood—exasperation. “For Christ’s sakes, Jules—she lied! It’s that simple. People like her will always lie. It’s because of who you are. Because of what you represent to them. You will never be anything but a potential payout… except to me.” Her gaze softened. “I keep telling you, Julian. In this line of work… I’m the only person you can trust.”
I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the e-mails. I was so transfixed by just how foolish I had to be to put myself in a situation like this. Tessa was right—I had played right into their hands, and now I would have to find a way to somehow dig myself back out of the grave I’d dug. I felt like I was falling, like I’d jumped out of a plane with no parachute, or even a hope of landing on anything soft as the ground rose up to meet me.
“Why didn’t she go public right away, then?” I wondered out loud, shuffling through the documents numbly. “Why did she wait almost a month…”
“That’s always bothered you, hasn’t it?” Tessa said, sighing as she rooted through the remainder of the stack. Finally, she pulled a sheet free. “Here. You won’t believe me if I tell you, so see for yourself.”
I read it over. Then I closed my eyes. “She was waiting on confirmation of the pregnancy.”
Tessa nodded. “Didn’t it strike you as one hell of a coincidence that her doctor called right as we showed up?”
No, I thought, though I dared not say it out loud for fear of looking even stupider. I’d had no idea that any of this was staged. From the very start, Liz had pulled at my heart strings. She was beautiful. She was a spitfire. She seemed the kind of girl who’d never had a day of fun in her whole life, and that made me want to take care of her, to show her how amazing life could be if she’d just let her guard down. She was a wildcat in bed, too, and I wondered if that was what had sealed the deal for me. Dear Lord, I hoped not. It was one thing to be a fool, but a fool as shallow and brain dead as all that? Hell, I might as well have applied for this year’s Darwin Award.
Well done, Liz, I thought, pushing the papers away. Bitterly, I recalled how the morning I’d woke up in that Vegas hotel room, she’d been gone—and how part of me had actually been impressed with that, impressed with the idea that she’d got me all turned around. You pulled one over on me. Right from the start.
“You’re right,” I said to Tessa at last, my voice tight as I fought back the emotion welling in my throat. Tessa had been there for me through thick and thin, seen me through to being the star I was today. If I couldn’t trust her, then what did I have? Years of her helping me rise to the top should have earned her enough respect to take her word at face value—even when it was something I didn’t want to hear. And yet I’d treated her as the enemy ever since Elizabeth Lawson walked into my life. A pang of guilt resonated in me. Tess deserved better. “I… I just don’t know what to say.”
“All you need to say,” Tessa said, gathering up the papers, “is that you were tricked, and that you have evidence that proves that Elizabeth Lawson planned your wedding and her pregnancy in order to extort money from you. Then you’ll say how betrayed you feel by all of this and we’ll go home back to London.”
I felt so tired suddenly, as though everything I’d had in me had been taken out through a straw. I felt like a husk of what I had been, a pale imitation of the man who had seen his baby’s ultrasound just a few hours beforehand. But now that memory had been sullied by what I’d just read in those e-mails. I’d been used—played like some schoolyard dolt for his lunch money, just because a woman batted her eyelashes at me and told me that she was going to have my child.
“Fuck makeup,” I said, rubbing my face as I stood up from the chair. “Let’s get this over with.” The last thing I wanted right now was to be touched, by anyone, but especially a woman.
I felt numb, almost directionless as I followed Tessa out of the room and down the hallway toward the sound of people milling about. I wasn’t even in the mood to hate those bastards with their cameras and incessant questions about nothing that even had any importance. I just wanted all of this to be over. I wanted to be back home, where I belonged. I never wanted to feel anything ever again.
If I had a choice, I would never even set foot in America again, and if that meant fading into obscurity, then I hardly gave a damn. Truth be told, drowning myself in an ocean of booze sounded like the best idea I’d had all bloody week, and the moment this stupid interview was over, I was going to start doing just that.
“Before I forget,” Tessa said, turning around and holding her hand out to me. “I need your phone.”
I stopped short. “Why?” I asked her, frowning even as I dutifully dug it out of my pocket and handed it over.
“Because I’m going to get you a new one,” she said with a smile. “She’s got your number, and since she’s been outed, I hardly think she’s going to keep that a secret. By now there have to be a hundred different news networks who
know it.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I muttered. Great, now even my phone had been spoiled, corrupted by Liz’s scheming and my terrible decisions. I was glad Tessa was getting rid of it. Its absence would provide me with one less reminder that I’d been duped.
“There’s a good lad,” she said, stowing the phone in her purse as she laid her hand on my back, leading me out toward the bright lights of a conference room. The moment I stepped inside the cameras started flashing, a sea of phosphor dots dancing in front of me as Tessa guided me over to a podium where I would address the crowd.
Already people were starting to shout out questions, most of them wondering how Liz had tricked me into marrying her and getting her pregnant. I was almost grateful when Tessa stepped in front of the crowd and asked for silence. Once the mob of reporters had quieted their din to a low rumble, I finally began to speak.
“Good afternoon,” I began, doing my best to keep the quaver out of my tone. “I have recently been made aware of certain information that proves that my so-called wife, Elizabeth Lawson, has in fact been lying to me since our meeting in Las Vegas, where she got me drunk, drugged me, and proceeded to use my impaired judgment in order to facilitate conceiving a child. Her plan was to receive child support through the American courts, as well as alimony after the planned termination of our marriage…”
I didn’t look anyone in the eye. Not a single one. I couldn’t bear to acknowledge the complete idiocy I’d engaged in, or the stupid brand of hope I’d felt that my life could change—that I could ever be anything other than what I was. That I could be loved the way other people were, known the way other people were, or love someone else the way I so desperately wanted to. In my line of work, there could be no trust. All I would ever know of love was the shitty lyrics I wrote to coerce teenage girls into buying my albums on iTunes.